This invention relates to a machine adapted for movement along the coke side of a battery of coke ovens, and more particularly to such a machine which includes a coke guide, a door handling device, a device for cleaning sealing surfaces of the coking chambers and a device for cleaning the sealing surface of a coke oven door after it is removed from a coke oven chamber.
In a battery of coke ovens, when coke is to be pushed from a given coking chamber, the coke guide machine of the present invention facilitates certain necessary and essential operations. When a coking chamber is to be pushed, the initial operation of the coke guide machine is to first extract the oven door which has been unlatched to thereby open the oven chamber. Thereafter, a coke guide is moved into a coke guiding relationship with the exposed oven chamber in readiness for pushing coke therefrom. After the coke pushing operation is completed, the coke guide is moved aside and a cleaning device is moved into a desired relation with the emptied oven chamber to clean the sealing surfaces of the chamber and at the same time a device is put into operation for cleaning the removed coke oven door. At the conclusion of these operations, the door handling device is again operated to replace and latch the coke oven door onto the oven chamber. During all of these operations, there must be an accurately-aligned relationship between the longitudinal axis of the coking chamber and the tracks supporting the movable devices, namely, the door handling device, the chamber cleaning device and the coke guide.
In the event that the various devices are fixedly mounted upon the coke guide machine, then the entire machine would be required to undergo repositioning movement a number of times and the particular devices on the machine would have to be individually aligned with the axis of the oven chamber to carry out the operations described above in a consecutive manner. It is known in the art that various appliances can be so disposed on a coke guide machine so that the operations of the devices can be performed while the coke guide machine remains in the same position. In this known arrangement, the various appliances are suspended on a support or bearing structure which is movable in the same direction as the movement of the coke guide machine. In this way, the coke guide machine is required to be aligned only once with the longitudinal axis of a coking chamber when it is to be pushed. The various appliances can be correctly positioned during the consecutive operations by their appropriate repositioning on the movable support or bearing structure.
In the known forms of a coke guide machine of the type just described, the machine is movable on a coke bench and the machine passes so closely to the buckstays for the coke oven that very little open space is left exposing the coke bench between the coke ovens and the coke guide machine. This is particularly undesirable in light of the present-day trend of designing coke oven chambers that are very large in height. The exposed space at the coke bench is very desirable since an inspection facility is required, usually in the form of a movable ladder or a suspended cage, for adjustment and readjustment of the sealing elements in the upper part of the oven doors. Moreover, it is desirable that the coke guide machine be designed in such a manner that it is possible to move the machine past such inspection facilities while located between the coke guide machine and the coke oven.